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"With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it."
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"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
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"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."
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"A writer's duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can."
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"Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents."
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Personal Development

"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."
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Personal Development

"Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea."
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Personal Development

"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."
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Personal Development

"At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind."
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"The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd."
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"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."
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Explore more quotes by Augusten Burroughs

"I was in advertising for years. That was cushy, you know? It's pretty cushy in a lot of ways, but I hated it."
Advertising

"Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true."
Want

"As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that's just not what happened."
Family

"I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in."
Experience

"I love to both give and receive very old books."
Love

"With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it."
Writing

"But my favorite band is Curbside Life, out of Chicago."
Life

"I'm like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I'm very conservative and boring in a lot of ways."
Conservative

"I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen."
Books

"I was on the cover of a lot of newspapers. I was on the cover of USA Today for every single day for a month. I was on the masthead, so I tend to get recognized a lot, and in weird places. It's always flattering, and it's always odd. It's always at the worst possible time."
Time
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